This story, Man charged with killing Heather Heyer at Charlottesville rally ‘thought he was acting in self-defense,’ attorney says, WTVR, November 27, 2018, is something we've been predicting since it happened.
See
In September, 2016, almost a year before the Charlottesville Rally that was attacked by Antifa, I did a column about self-defense in a riot situation that was inspired by Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) being banned from Twitter over this tweet:
That was during a violent riot in Charlotte, NC (not Charlottesville) over the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in self-defence by a black Charlotte officer.
Paul Kersey blogged on some of the victims of that riot: Dawn of the Blacks: Horrifying 9-1-1 Calls From Charlotte Motorists Under Assault by Black Lives Matter Rioters.
Here's what I wrote (remember, this is before Charlottesville) about what happens in riots like the 2016 Charlotte riot:
The 1983 book The Truth About Self-Protection [Read it on OpenLibrary] by Massad Ayoob (who, if you've never heard of him, is a "hundred percent American" like the late Danny Thomas) was written before the "Rodney King Riots" in LA, but after the Liberty City riots of 1980. Chapter 20 is "The Truth About Cars", considered both as a place to be attacked, and a means of escape and defense.
From page 156
"But when someone threatens your life, your car is two things: It is an escape and it is a weapon. It can get you away from danger fast and if worse comes to worse, it's a multithousand-pound guided bludgeon that strikes with an impact force that makes a Magnum bullet seem like a hiccup. The .357 slug delivers about 350 foot-pounds of energy. A 4,000-pound car at 30 miles an hour delivers 120,000 foot-pounds of energy, and almost half a million foot-pounds of energy at 60 miles an hour."
Think about that, the next time someone who tries to run over a police officer and gets shot is described as an "unarmed" teen.
From Page 172-173 [emphasis added by me, both in Ayoob and Wikipedia]
"But suppose you are being attacked by people on foot, and you manage to gain the very temporary sanctuary of your automobile?It may not be a fortress, but your car is still an escape avenue and a mobile battering ram, a weapon deadlier than any gun. Innocent people have died when they were surrounded by fanatical rioters and panicked—look at the horror of the Miami riots."
"But when someone threatens your life, your car is two things: It is an escape and it is a weapon. It can get you away from danger fast and if worse comes to worse, it's a multithousand-pound guided bludgeon that strikes with an impact force that makes a Magnum bullet seem like a hiccup. The .357 slug delivers about 350 foot-pounds of energy. A 4,000-pound car at 30 miles an hour delivers 120,000 foot-pounds of energy, and almost half a million foot-pounds of energy at 60 miles an hour."
